Disseminating the Social Demographic of Expat Supermarket Shoppers in Phnom Penh
One thing I’ve recently been disseminating is the social demographic of expat supermarket shoppers in Phnom Penh. Lucky Sihanouk attracts NGO types and American missionaries. Thai Huot attracts the French and an ad hoc amalgam of disparate but well heeled expats. Expat bar owners seem to like Bayon. Lucky Olympic Stadium appeals to respectable married mixed couples. Lucky Soriya, however, pulls in the social group D2 sexpat freak show in sizeable numbers.
In Lucky Soriya’s case, perhaps it’s the proximity to Daun Penh, the new prowler ground zero with its abundance of hostess bars, and 11 Sangkats and 134 Kroms of compact and bijou low end cigar tube $150 per month apartments, ideal for the single sexpat on a disability pension.
One morning last week, following three hours exhausting toil down the air conditioned brain mine, I remembered the ready availability of Campbells canned soup in Luckys, (the Soriya branch being close to my office) and fancied a bowl for lunch. It being 11am, I decided to make an early morning hit and run at a time when I guessed the prowlers would still be asleep.
I was wrong and had hardly made the soup can aisle when I encountered a nasty little man of about forty, with an unnecessary moustache who looked like a teacher I hated whose name I can no longer remember, and whose conversation (conducted entirely with himself) seemed to consist of strange little monosyllabic stone-age grunts. He hovered near a fridge putting cans of Anchor carefully into his basket until entirely satisfied that he couldn’t fit a single more can in.
Next, there was an obese swaggering man-breasted chap in his fifties with little tufts of head hair poking in several directions and a seemingly twelve year old Khmer girlfriend. He took a free and easy attitude to lasciviously groping her bum in public yet his hacking cough suggested that death was hovering nearby and flapping its big black wings over his head.
Then there was another one with canary yellow shorts, a purple string vest and an alarming Leo Sayer-style seventies perm who’d clearly sought and found the palliative benefits of alcohol at 11am and was waving his arms about frantically at the baggage check in. The Khmer staff were perhaps having some fun at his expense by pretending to have lost his rucksack.
At this stage I began to feel a little faint and a voice in my head whispered something characteristically restrained and moderate like, ‘Your fist has been especially designed for donkey-punching one of these prowlers into the nearest freezer.’ It was clearly time to leave as there were more of these men and they seemed to be surrounding me like cartoon bogeymen or zombies in a George Romero film. Sexpats are certainly at their scariest when spotted doing things in their spare time and away from their natural habitat of hostess bars or Martinis.
So I couldn’t get out of this insane asylum fast enough and let out an exhausted ‘triumph over adversity’ groan (like Nadal when he beat Federer at Wimbledon) on finally getting home and shutting the door behind me. I think I’ll stick to Thai Huot from now on, even though it doesn’t stock Campbell‘s soup.
Meanwhile in China, the inhabitants of Beijing have been warned by their rulers to stop spitting in the street, eating vast quantities of things that make their breath stink, burping loudly, scratching their nuts in public and wearing pyjamas when they’re out and about so as to create a good impression on the rest of the world as the Olympic Games play out.
Maybe Lucky Soriya should start blasting out a similar message by tannoy in English telling middle aged expats not be drunk at 11am and not to bring their teenage bits of fluff into the supermarket and to avoid wearing badly co-ordinated clothing or muttering to themselves loudly, and then be rigorous in implementing these rules. It’d be a start.